ætle i / rð. · r!\ In ,,\ . [V 'Ii .-:' ' was a college professor with a mortgage and a car loan did not factor into my threat assessment. Still, in the early nineteen- seventies in Berkeley; there were plenty of bad things happening on a more ran- dom basis. One day, there was a knock at our front door, the top half of which was a big, swlng-out window. I opened the window to two young men whose ques- tion to me (I can't now recall it) was so obviously trumped up, whose interest was so clearly in the living room beyond me, that I swung the window shut in mid- sentence and locked it. I stood watching from behind a curtain as they made their way up the street, knocking on doors and peering through windows. I reported the incident to my parents, who advised me not to let my imagination run wild. My terror of kidnappers and burglars eventually reached such a pitch that my mother-who by then had left the insur- ance company and returned to nursing, taking a job at a cOlJ.valescent hospital- arrived at a novel solution to the problem, a kind of one-woman Take Our Daugh- ters to WorkDa She bought a couple of yards of blue-and-white ticking, ran up a candy-striper uniform on the sewing machine, and introduced me, at age thir- teen, to a career in the health-care indus- In lieu of a lunch hour, she would leave the hospital at three o'clock, pick me up from school, and take us both back to work to finish the shift. I would change out of my school uniform into my work clothes and spend the rest of the afternoon officiously copying chart headings, wheel- ing patients around the facility (a courtesy they tended to en- dure rather than appreciate), and making an endless series of tongue-depressor houses and cotton-ball bunnies in the dayroom, where I was encour- aged in my work by the young, friendly occupational therapist. I did not last in my new post. 1 would grow bored long before quitting time, and it was hard for my mother to do her job and also put up with my pestering suggestions that we knock off early and swing by McDonald's for shakes. And eventually she took a better job, at a hospital in Oakland, which was too far away for her to pick me up each afternoon. Once again, I was on my own, fretting about unseen dangers while the 40 THE NEW YOR.KER., JULY 5, 2004 defrosting casserole sat unappetizingly on the counter, in a puddle of melt. No mother today who could afford to do otherwise would go to work without making any provision for her young child except to tie a key around her neck and hope for the best. My mother was by no means indifferent about me; I was her pet, the baby of the famil But children then were not under constant adult su- pervision, even if their mothers were housewives. By the time I was five, I was allowed to wander away from the house so long as I didn't cross any big streets; I had the run of the neighborhood at six. So the idea that I would be home alone in the afternoons at the age of twelve was not a radical or an overly worrisome one for my mother. A good &iend of mine was only nine when her mother took a vol- unteer job and left the child on her own in the afternoons. Such an arrangement was not then seen as a shocking dereliction of duty: a nine-year-old could be trusted with a key; a nine-year-old knew how to work a telephone if anything went wrong. Moreover, anxiety as a precondition of the maternal experience had not yet been invented. We kids were topped up with Salk vaccine, our fathers had saved the world, and our neighborhoods were chock-full of busybody housewives who delighted in scolding other people's er- rant children. Terrible things happened then, just as they do today. But they tended not to have the titanic significance of the contempo- rary event. Once, when I was in third grade, we were all given purple-and-white mimeo- graphed letters to bring home to our mothers. The letters re- ported that a child molester had been preying on children walking home from the next el- ementary school over. "What's a child molester?" I kept asking my mother, who stood in the - kitchen reading the letter in a concerned wa That was not for me to know-but neither was it sufficient cause for my mother to forbid me to roam the neighborhood after school. I should just "be carefill." ("Carefill of what?" Just care- fill.) My mother and her &iends probably would not have made a best-seller of "The Lovely Bones." At age twelve, I wasn't doing much that required my mother's presence. The notion that after-school hours might con- stitute prime time for improve me nt- athletic, academic, social, psychiatric- was still years awa When I think of what it was like to be a girl then, I re- member an endless series of afternoons, each an ungraspable piece of time. I watched television, and hurtled perilously down our steep block on my Schwinn, and dressed the cats in baby clothes. Chil- dr did ' h " . " d " al " en n t ave passIons an tents; we had hobbies and collections-glass animals and plastic horses for girls, base- ball cards for boys, and stamps for geeks of both genders. These were activities that required no parental involvement and produced just as little quantifiable enrichment. Why should my mother have to sulk around the kitchen, weepy with frustration, her only job to provide me with a beacon of reassurance--and to muscle off the S.L.A. if it came for me- while I wrestled the cats into pinafores and watched reruns of "Lost in Space"? The rhetoric of liberation exhorted women to go to work not in spite of their children but-at least partly-because of them. The notion was that housewives made poor mothers. Betty Friedan re- ported "strange new problems" with those children "whose mothers were always there, driving them around, helping them with their homework-an inability to endure pain or discipline or pursue any self-sustained goal of any sort, a devastat- ing boredom with life." Being on my own recognizance was supposed to toughen me up, to deliver me from my mother's crippling cosseting and vault me to new levels of independence-not an unrea- sonable theof)T. If I had had a different temperament, it might have worked. (As it is, however, I remain an inveterate loser of keys-and sunglasses and credit cards-and my anxiety about being alone in a house borders on the pathological.) In a 1970 discussion of day care, the fem- inists Louise Gross and Phyllis Taube Greenleaf wrote that the institution could be a means of liberating not only women but also children. For what were the tots learning at home except that it was a place of female enslavement? M y mother's tenure as a working woman was short-hved. We spent a year overseas while my father was on sabbatical-requiring my mother to give up the best job of the lot--and by the